1/7/2021 – 105 years ago today, on January 7, 1916, Paul Keres was born. For more than 30 years, Keres was one of the world's best players, but although he finished second in four Candidates Tournaments, he never played a match for the World Championship. 105 years is not a round anniversary, but an occasion to look at a highlight of a long career. At the 1954 Chess Olympiad, Keres won gold with the Soviet Union team, and scored 13½/14 on board 4 - one of the best results ever achieved at Olympiads.

1/7/2021 – FIDE has a new Managing Director. Dana Reizniece-Ozola, Woman Grandmaster and former Latvian Minister of Economics and later Finance, leaves the world of Latvian politics and dedicates herself to the politics of chess. | Image: Janis Deinats

1/7/2021 – Hundreds of different Fritztrainers have been teaching us chess on ChessBase for more than a decade. Maybe you sometimes wonder what else the authors of these Fritztrainers do? "Meet the Fritztrainer" takes a look behind the scenes, telling us more about the private life of your favourite chess trainer. We already had the pleasure to talk to GM Chris Ward, and in this second episode we turn our attention to IM Merijn van Delft. The Dutch IM talks a bit about his weekly show "Game of the week", his first Fritztrainer and what "chess" means to him. | Photos: Merijn van Delft

1/7/2021 – Originally, the fourth and final tournament of the Women's Grand Prix 2019 was scheduled to take place in Gibraltar, from January 17th to January 29th. But due to the Corona pandemic and high infection rates in Gibraltar, FIDE decided to postpone the tournament. Press release...

1/6/2021 – This week Merijn van Delft takes another look at the Airthings Masters. He focuses on the match between Daniil Dubov and Maxime Vachier-Lagrave, an interesting clash of styles and a tense battle with a lot of decisive games. | Merijn's show is available at 16.00 UTC (17:00 CET, 12:00 EDT) and on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here. | Photo: Lennart Ootes

1/6/2021 – Over the turn of the year, the British Chess Federations organised their annual championship as an online tournament. Michael Adams, with a rating of 2716 currently Britain's number 1, was clear favourite. Adams indeed won the title, but only after a close play-off against IM Ameet Ghasi. | Photo: ECF

1/6/2021 – At the end of the year, Netflix organised a little video chat between Anya Taylor-Joy, who played Beth Harmon, the fictional world's best player, in the Netflix series "The Queen's Gambit", and the real-life best women player in history: Judit Polgar. An interesting talk!

1/6/2021 – The Pacific Northwest Chess Center (PNWCC) wants to make chess more popular and wants to give chess players opportunities to play and to improve. Before corona the PNWCC was organising a lot of live events, during the pandemic the Chess Center organises attractive and strong online tournaments. At the end of last year, the Winter of Washington tournament was played, a nine-round online tournament. Igor Kovalenko, Levan Pantsulaia and Haik Martirosyan shared first with 7.0/9 each.

1/6/2021 – In his "Weekly Show" IM Lawrence Trent will revisit Radjabov’s fantastic victory over Levon Aronian in the Airthings Masters final. The focus will be on their fantastic game 1 of the final day, which ended in a draw but could have easily been a win for either player! | Lawrence's show is available at 17:00 UTC (18:00 CET, 12:00 ET) on-demand with a ChessBase Premium Account. You can register a Premium account here.

1/5/2021 – For two years now, "The Analysis" has been a permanent column in the ChessBase Magazine. The editors choose "the best" of the usually more than 30 annotated games in an issue. In the current issue CBM #199 it is very a special game: in Duda-Carlsen (Norway Chess 2020) the World Champion's series of 125 classical tournament games without defeat came to an end. The winner, our author Jan-Krzysztof Duda, comments. Take a look and join in the victory!

1/5/2021 – In his first podcast of 2021 Eric van Reem continues his talk with the renowned trainer and writer IM Venkatchalam Saravanan from India. In part I of the podcast they talked about the chess year 2020, the online chess boom in India, the upcoming Anand biopic, and the Candidates Tournament. In part II they talk about chess books. | Photo: Amruta Mokal

1/5/2021 – Endings with opposite coloured bishops have drawish tendencies. And often positional factors are more important than material, particularly so when building a fortress is the order of the day: White to play and draw!